Category: The Dish

Ignatius Smoothes Out The Prose

After my post yesterday on the crudely imperialist assumptions embedded in David Ignatius’ latest column, a couple of sentences were changed. A reader caught them:

Your excerpt: “President Obama sensibly appears to be leaning toward an alternative policy that would replace Maliki with a less sectarian and polarizing prime minister — and then begin using U.S. military power on behalf of this more broadly based government. The White House is already mulling a list of alternative prime ministers.”

His piece now reads:  Obama has concluded that Iraq faces all-out civil war and partition unless it replaces Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki with a less sectarian and polarizing leader. U.S. diplomats are floating the names of alternative candidates in Baghdad. Meanwhile, Obama is sending up to 300 military advisers to assess if the Iraqi army can be salvaged after it collapsed in Anbar province, Mosul and Tikrit.

Which, assuming the correction came from the administration, is good news. I was probably hyper-ventilating yesterday and not for the first time. Obama is likely not going to do something stupid in Iraq. But the tone of Ignatius’ piece was gob-smacking.

The Most Expensive Item In The World

By one measure, it’s a cute little stamp:

The British Guiana One-Cent Magenta stamp that was sold at Sotheby’s in New York Tuesday fetched a world-record price for the fourth time in its long life. It went under the hammer at $7.9 million – $9.48 million if the 20-percent buyer’s premium is included – to an anonymous private bidder. This makes it the most expensive item in the world by weight and size, according to the auction house.

Laurel Dalrymple shares some of its colorful backstory:

Just one copy of the One-Cent is known to exist, and it has not been seen in public for 30 years. … The stamp’s first owner was a Scottish boy named Vernon Vaughan who found it in 1873 among his family’s letters. He sold it to a local collector for 6 shillings (The Washington Post says that was about $1.50 back then). From there, the stamp passed through the hands of many philatelists, including Philipp von Ferrary, one of the world’s greatest stamp collectors. It also spent some time in a Berlin museum and in the hands of the French as World War I reparations.

The stamp nearly ended up in the hands of King George V, but he underbid. It is the one major piece absent from the Royal Family’s heirloom collection of stamps, said David Beech, recently retired curator of stamps at the British Library.

On a less charming note, The Economist observes that the stamp – which, Sotheby’s was quick to point out, sold for nearly 1 billion times its face value – is just the latest example of gross excess brought to you by income inequality:

Why have prices for very rare stamps risen so high? The broad reason is that number of extremely wealthy people in the world has soared in recent years. The Hurun Global Rich List, published in February, counted 1,867 dollar-billionaires, an increase of 414 on the previous year. That means ever higher premiums are paid for the most covetable items over those that are merely good – from world-famous works of art, to the finest wines, to one-of-a-kind stamps. One estimate suggests that really rare stamps have risen in value by 11 percent annually for the past four decades; meanwhile the value of good-but-not-extraordinary collections has slumped.

“Dear Jerry You Old Bastard”

Kelsey McKinney interviews novelist Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year, about her time answering the reclusive writer’s fan mail:

JR: I answered such a high volume that they fell into these categories for me. There were letters from people who I called in my head the crazies,” which ranged from people who seemed totally bonkers to weird stalker Unabomber people in love with Salinger. These letters often would be written in pencil, or pen but with blotches of ink smudged all over the paper. There was something really repulsive about it, almost as if they were like, “here are my bodily fluids on the page.” There were those people, and I was told that if anything seemed particularly crazy, I was supposed to report it to my boss’s second in command.

Then there were adolescents and people in their early 20s who would write in the voice of Holden or in the voice of Salinger, and those letters were hilarious. “Dear Jerry you old bastard. Me and my crumbund were thinking about how phony everyone in the world is. You’re the only person who totally gets us.”

KM: You didn’t read Salinger’s books until you were already working for the agency. What was it like reading his work while reading these fan letters?

JR: A lot of the reason I ultimately read him was seeing the impact he had made on these people’s lives. Somehow, for to this vast swath of the world’s population, he was able to make them feel less alone. They wrote these letters to him that were so intimate. They conflated Salinger with Holden, and what I got from that was that his work had such an intimacy of voice, and the stakes were so high in his work that somehow these readers were able to enter into these works as if they were kind of part of a texture of their own lives instead of a work of fiction. Which is ultimately what the best fiction does.

Where Your Information Lives

FRANCE-INTERNET-TECHNOLOGY-DIGITAL-REALTY

In a consideration of commercial architecture, Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan nominates the data center as the 21st-century successor to the factory:

It’s hard not to see the parallels… Each type of building is designed for very specific commercial activities, and each has to adhere to strict budgets and schedules. They are both perfectly utilitarian. … As [architect Marco] Magarelli explained to me, these are far from normal buildings: Some data centers use more than 100 times the power of a typical office building. They need to be ultra-secure and ultra-stable against hackers, natural disasters, and all kinds of environmental ills. These are the buildings that hold the world’s data – if they go, so does our Internet.

(Photo: Filters that are part of a cooling system line a room inside the Facebook Inc. Prineville Data Center in Prineville, Oregon, on April 28, 2014. By Meg Roussos/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A Problem You Can’t Scrub Away

Illinois recently became the first state to ban microbeads – those little plastic bits of grit found in some personal hygiene products. Katherine Martinko explains the environmental rationale:

Microbeads give facial and body scrubs a grainy texture for exfoliation, but they are an ecological nightmare. Because they range in size from 0.0004 to 1.24 millimeters, they are too small to be filtered out by water treatment plants. They get flushed into waterways, ending up in lakes where they float, absorb toxins, and get eaten by marine animals because they resemble fish eggs. It takes a freshwater mussel 47 days to flush out ingested microbeads.

Martinko shows how the decision has repercussions far beyond the Land of Lincoln:

Illinois’s ban is important, but one more statewide ban is desperately needed, since that would create a “distribution nightmare” for companies and force them to come up with alternatives. The CBC quoted 5 Gyres associate director Stiv Wilson: “Effectively by winning two states, you win the entire North American region.” New York, Ohio, and California all have anti-microbead legislation in the works.

Meanwhile, researchers are working to develop eco-friendly alternatives to the plastic beads. Alexa Kurzius considers the prospects of polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA), a “bioplastic” made with fermented bacteria:

[T]he majority of microplastics tend to float, which means they move readily from your shower drain, through wastewater treatment plants, and into waterways. “It’s like the saying from Finding Nemo,” explains [researcher Kirk] Havens. “All drains lead to the ocean.”

PHA, on the other hand, is denser than water, and thus sinks to the bottom. When it sinks, it’s buried with other sediment or consumed by salt or freshwater bacteria. This is an improvement over synthetic microplastics, which are more likely to be eaten by microorganisms that mistake the tiny pellets for food. But if bacteria consume PHA, they break the substance down into water, carbon dioxide, biomass, and naturally occurring small molecules after a few months. These substances are relatively harmless compared to longer-living man-made plastics like polyethylene.

Update from a reader:

Just wanted make a slight correction to the quote you provide from Martinko. Microbeads can be removed by water treatment plants. Coagulation/flocculation removes particles down to 0.01 microns and granulation media filtration removes particles down to 0.5 um. So, microbeads wouldn’t end up in your drinking water.

Wastewater treatment plants, however, do not have the same emphasis on particle removal so, yes, microbeads do end up in receiving water ways.

Plate Invaders

Hannah Newman takes stock of the burgeoning “invasivore” movement:

Norman’s Cay is currently the only American restaurant north of South Carolina serving 800px-Pterois_volitans_Manado-e_editlionfish, but that’s likely to change soon, thanks to a fast-spreading trend seeking to use our appetites as a way to control the vast numbers of plants and animals colonizing new habitats and destroying native species.

Yet as the second lionfish taco quickly disappeared from my plate, I couldn’t help but wonder: Can we really take down invasives with knives and forks? If more of us eat lionfish, wild boar tenderloin, Asian carp fritters, or garlic mustard pesto, will it make a difference?

Experts are skeptical, pointing out that once a foreign species has entrenched itself in a new place – such as the Indo-Pacific lionfish that has now virtually taken over the waters of the Western Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico – eradication is almost impossible. Critics argue that encouraging consumption might have the unintended effect of spreading harmful species even more widely. But the invasivores are undeterred, noting that their campaign is not only selling books and changing restaurant menus; it’s also spreading awareness of a crippling environmental problem that is rapidly homogenizing the world’s ecosystems and costing over $130 billion a year in the United States alone.

(Photo: The red lionfish [Pterois volitans] is one of two species of lionfish to colonize the the east coast of North America and the Caribbean. It’s pictured above its native habitat in Indonesia. By Jens Petersen)

A Day Late And A Dollar Short

Mulling over the link between “time poverty” and economic want, Konnikova contends that “in the case of someone who isn’t otherwise poor, poverty of time is an unpleasant inconvenience. But for someone whose lack of time is just one of many pressing concerns, the effects compound quickly”:

We make a mistake when we look at poverty as simply a question of financial constraint. Take what happened with my request for an extension. It was granted, and the immediate time pressure was relieved. But even though I met the new deadline (barely), I’m still struggling to dig myself out from the rest of the work that accumulated in the meantime. New deadlines that are about to whoosh by, a growing list of ignored errands, a rent check and insurance payment that I just realized I haven’t mailed. And no sign of that promised light at the end of the tunnel.

My experience is the time equivalent of a high-interest loan cycle, except instead of money, I borrow time. But this kind of borrowing comes with an interest rate of its own: By focusing on one immediate deadline, I neglect not only future deadlines but the mundane tasks of daily life that would normally take up next to no time or mental energy. It’s the same type of problem poor people encounter every day, multiple times: The demands of the moment override the demands of the future, making that future harder to reach.

The Best Of The Dish Today

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So here’s a reason to be cheerful: this fantastic vignette of American democracy alive and well in Mississippi. It’s a Coffee Klatch of octagenarians at Kroger’s in support of Chris McDaniel, and a Democrat walks by:

“How, with no seniority and a promise simply not to get along with anyone, will you accomplish any of the things you want to accomplish?” shouted John Davis, a 77-year-old retired teacher who was shopping at Kroger’s grocery when he noticed Mr. McDaniel about to begin a meet and greet session with about a dozen local retirees.

“What have they accomplished lately by putting us in debt?” shot back Mr. McDaniel, who outpolled Mr. Cochran in the June 3 primary but is facing in a June 24 run off because he did not break 50%.

Mr. Davis, with finger-wagging emphasis, retorted, “What have they accomplished? They have accomplished airports. They have accomplished roads. They have accomplished schools.’’

Shit is going down. The Democrat is really way too loud and won’t sit down, but it only gets a little bit tense:

“Dissent is a good thing in this country but you don’t do it in that manner,” said Mr. McDaniel. He found a way to turn the confrontation into a dig at Mr. Cochran, who has refused to meet his primary opponent in a debate and has been criticized by Mr. McDaniel for not talking more about issues. Mr. McDaniel said of Mr. Davis, “He said more about his positions than Thad Cochran has said in his entire campaign.”

One woman praised Mr. McDaniel for maintaining his composure but told him to be tougher if he gets elected to the Senate. “When you get to Washington, don’t be that nice,’’ said Geri, who asked that her last name not be used.

The video is awesome too. Or maybe I’m just sick of Sunni and Shia and seeing some ancient Southerners have it out at Kroger’s is a balm.

So, anyway, it was Neocon Hathos Day on the Dish and you can get your dose of Cheney here. Kristol here. NPod here. Their unnerving fondness for Hillary Clinton here.

I threw up my arms at the CIA’s latest hopes for a war in Iraq and Syria, while trying to make sense of the resilient resistance to the most important breakthrough in HIV prevention in two decades. Oh, and Boies and Olson are channeling Jo Becker. In some cases, it doesn’t get better, does it?

Plus: the challenges of standing for a month for fitness’ sake; and what taking a simple walk is like if you have autism. Major ’80s nostalgia here.

The most popular posts of the day were Obama Caught Another Terrorist And The Right Can’t Handle It, followed by Have the Cheneys Finally Jumped The Shark?

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here.  You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 15 18 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: the triped this evening)

Demystifying Death

Reviewing Victor Brombert’s Musings on Mortality, a collection of essays on how a number of literary figures approached death, Joseph Epstein recounts Montaigne’s advice for considering your eventual demise:

Putting death out of mind as best one can is a mistake, or so Montaigne thought. Wiser, he felt, to think constantly about death, not so much to confront it—how, in any case, would one do that?—but to get used to the idea of its ineluctability, and also of the suddenness with which it may visit. “How can we ever rid ourselves of thoughts of death,” he writes, “or stop imagining that death has us by the scruff of the neck at every moment.” Better to familiarize oneself with the idea. “Let us deprive death of its strangeness,” he wrote, “let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death.” Montaigne himself claims regularly to have been besieged by thoughts of death, “even in the most licentious period of my life.”

… All learning, he believed, was to make us ready for the end, to prepare us for death. “To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die” is the title of his essay, and major statement, on the subject. He hoped that when death finally did appear, “it will bear no new warning for me. As far as we possibly can we must have our boots on, ready to go.”